A Home for the Heart to Live In: An Interactive Poetry Workshop & a 2oth Annual Gathering of Poets

December 6, 2026 | Baltimore Museum of Art | Motor House

TERRANCE HAYES will be the featured reader at A Home for the Heart to Live In, CityLit Project's annual gathering of poets at the nonprofit arts/performance space Motor House. Each year on the first Sunday in December, our featured poet joins an assembly of poets curated and hosted by REGINALD (REGGIE) HARRIS and CityLit Project for an afternoon celebration of poetry, a splendid day of words (and this year, music) where promise and power take the stage. Along with revered Cave Canem Fellows, we include esteemed poets who took a different path, honoring all the ways we arrive at poetry. We showcase a spectacular round-up of poets, who will share one or two of their latest works. This year’s convening expands to include a special partnership with The Hopkins Review and Baltimore Museum of Art.

This annual, heart-lifting event marks the 20th gathering of poetry fellows and poetry lovers, a convening that morphs into a singular experience. This year's iteration pushes the boundaries and widens its doors with a morning, interactive poetry workshop, and an afternoon poetry reading. Ten poets will join Terrance on stage to share poems. This year, we hope to make time for an audience Q&A at the end of the program. “Won’t you poet that?” Lucille Clifton often said when she heard or felt something profound. This annual convening promises an afternoon of wonder. CityLit has long believed it is one thing to read poetry in the quiet reflection in one’s own company, and quite another to hear it delivered in a roomful of word lovers, in a space that embraces the extraordinary along with the ordinary. A book signing will follow.

One of the most compelling and prolific voices in American poetry, Terrance Hayes is the author of seven books of poetry: So to Speak (2023); American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry and winner of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; How to Be Drawn (2015), longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry; Lighthead (2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; Wind in a Box, winner of a Pushcart Prize; Hip Logic, winner of the National Poetry Series, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Muscular Music, winner of both the Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He is also the author of To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (2018), which won the 2019 Etheridge Knight Criticism Collection award from The Poetry Foundation; and, most recently, Watch Your Language (2023), a collection of graphic reviews, illustrated prose, and visualized poetics addressing the last century of American poetry.

Past poetry gatherings featured Danez Smith, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Yona Harvey, Brionne Janae, Aja Monet, Evie Shockley, Mahogany L. Browne, and Holly Bass, among others.

“First you’ll marvel at his skill, his near-perfect pitch, his disarming humor, his brilliant turns of phrase. Then you’ll notice the grace, the tenderness, the unblinking truth-telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world.” —Cornelius Eady.